The grave is dug, the headstone carved, the hearse idling out front. A once-potent political and cultural scourge of our time, Liberalism, is breathing its last?and loudest?breaths. In this provocative postmortem, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. traces the dubious rise and inevitable fall of the deeply flawed Liberal-Progressive movement, which has culminated in the nation's first stealth socialist, President Barack Obama?the unwitting pallbearer for American Liberalism. While exposing this nonsensical worldview, Tyrrell also winsomely reaffirms the timeless values Liberalism has endeavored to undermine: free enterprise, personal liberty, limited government, empiricism, reason, and common sense. Ultimately, Tyrrell welcomes conservatives, moderates, independents, and the heretofore apolitical to step forward at this crucial juncture, and take the final steps necessary to administer Liberalism's last rites. "From Harry Truman to Ed Koch to McGovern, Liberalism has been in decline. With Obama, Liberalism is dead. Now comes Crony Capitalism. This is a hilarious and profound book?especially because Tyrrell sees the value of Fox News nd Talk Radio." ?Sean Hannity, author of Conservative Victory, and radio host of The Sean Hannity Show and Fox News Channel's Hannity. "R. Emmett Tyrrell . . . chronicles with growing joyfulness the high points of Liberalism's demise until we get to 2010 and Liberalism's lurch into the grave. . . A wonderful read and a fitting send-off to a very dreary ideology." ?Mark Levin, host of The Mark Levin Radio Show and author of the bestsellers Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia "The Death of Liberalism is a dashing, sharp, well-argued and succinct tract for the times. Mr. Tyrrell is a controversialist of stature, a polemicist of robust energy and a man who knows how to present his case with power and precision."?Paul Johnson, author of Modern Times, Intellectuals, and A History of the American People

Center-right conservative author J. R. Dunn offers a cogent analysis of how liberalism has not only failed as an ideology but has proven fatal to citizens and societies around the world. Dunn’s piercing analysis of the Obama administration’s perilous public policy agenda is a provocative, must-read rallying cry for Tea Party adherents, fans of Ann Coulter and Jonah Goldberg, or anyone concerned about the left’s deadly impact on the future.

"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, American Conservative Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

In this provocative book, H. W. Brands confronts the vital question of why an ever-increasing number of Americans do not trust the federal government to improve their lives and to heal major social ills. How is it that government has come to be seen as the source of many of our problems, rather than the potential means of their solution? How has the word liberal become a term of abuse in American political discourse? From the Revolution on, argues Brands, Americans have been chronically skeptical of their government. This book succinctly traces this skepticism, demonstrating that it is only during periods of war that Americans have set aside their distrust and looked to their government to defend them. The Cold War, Brands shows, created an extended--and historically anomalous--period of dependence, thereby allowing for the massive expansion of the American welfare state. Since the 1970s, and the devastating blow dealt to Cold War ideology by America's defeat in Vietnam, Americans have returned to their characteristic distrust of government. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Brands contends, the fate of American liberalism was sealed--and we continue to live with the consequences of its demise.

Liberalism is dying—despite its superficial appearance of vigor. Most of its adherents still believe it is the wave of the future, but they are clinging to a sinking dream. So says Melvyn L. Fein, who argues that liberalism has made countless promises, almost none of which have come true. Under its auspices, poverty was not eliminated, crime did not diminish, the family was not strengthened, education was not improved, nor was universal peace established. These failures were not accidental; they flow directly from liberal contradictions. In Post-Liberalism, Fein demonstrates why this is the case. Fein contends that an "inverse force rule" dictates that small communities are united by strong forces, such as personal relationships and face-to-face hierarchies, while large-scale societies are integrated by weak forces, such as technology and social roles. As we become a more complex techno-commercial society, the weak forces become more dominant. This necessitates greater decentralization, in direct opposition to the centralization that liberals celebrate. Paradoxically, this suggests that liberalism, as an ideology, is regressive rather than progressive. If so, it must fail. Liberals assume that some day, under their tutelage, these trends will be reversed, but this contradicts human nature and history’s lessons. According to Fein, we as a species are incapable of eliminating hierarchy or of loving all other humans with equal intensity. Neither, as per Emile Durkheim, are we able to live in harmony without appropriate forms of social cohesion.

The financial crisis seemed to present a fundamental challenge to neo liberalism, the body of ideas that have constituted the political orthodoxy of most advanced economies in recent decades. Colin Crouch argues in this book that it will shrug off this challenge. The reason is that while neo liberalism seems to be about free markets, in practice it is concerned with the dominance over public life of the giant corporation. This has been intensified, not checked, by the recent financial crisis and acceptance that certain financial corporations are ‘too big to fail'. Although much political debate remains preoccupied with conflicts between the market and the state, the impact of the corporation on both these is today far more important. Several factors have brought us to this situation: The lobbying power of firms whose donations are of growing importance to cash-hungry politicians and parties The weakening of competitive forces by firms large enough to shape and dominate their markets The moral initiative that is grasped by enterprises that devise their own agendas of corporate social responsibility Both democratic politics and the free market are weakened by these processes, but they are largely inevitable and not always malign. Hope for the future, therefore, cannot lie in suppressing them in order to attain either an economy of pure markets or a socialist society. Rather it lies in dragging the giant corporation fully into political controversy.